Diary

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Ines and my first poem

Where this idea came from was a total mystery to me. It wasn’t something that I chose. It was something that had somehow chosen me.

Something that left me feeling frightened and embarrassed and ashamed. And that I had absolutely no belief that i could actually do.

My French teacher told me that Camus kept notebooks and he was a writer I completely admired and so I started to keep a notebook too.

And then I wrote my first poem when I was about 14, maybe, and it was about my mother’s death.

I was twelve at that time and expecting to see her at my confirmation and first communion. I had seen her the day before and was so looking forward to seeing her again.

But there was my dad instead and he told me she had died very suddenly in the night.

And I went numb.

I was a great fan of C.S.Forester and his Hornblower books in those days and had read of a marine on a ship’s deck whose arm had been lopped off by a cannonball and just stared numbly at it in shock.

And I wrote something like

“I’ve heard that when you cut off someone’s hand….”

to get myself started and when I had finished the poem submitted it to the school magazine.

There was a kind of wooden posting box outside the classrooms where you could put submissions. I was too shy to sign my poem and kind of hung about until there was no-one around and then posted it in the box when no-one could see me.

And then waited for the magazine to come out to see if it was published.

Which it wasn’t.

And that was that, I thought, assuming what I’d written was rubbish as I always did those days.

It’s our misfortune to live in a society that teaches us to stifle and mistrust our creative impulse; and that, together with all the appalling self mistrust that goes with being transgendered, meant it took me years to have any self belief.

I certainly never believed in that poem.

Until years later when I was writing the play “Ines de Castro” and had got to the bit when Ines hears of the death of her children, I found her saying:

“I’ve heard that when you cut off someone’s hand….”

And I wrote the lines and Alison Peebles said them in her amazing heart-breaking way and they found their way into the opera and tonight and Saturday Stephanie Corey will sing them, beautifully, to James MacMillan’s wonderful music.

And to me they will speak of my mother.

I don’t know what they will mean to the audience. But I am sure they will touch someone’s memory of loss.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Jekyll & Hyde & Ines & Violence on stage

I’m at the rehearsals for my new play, which is based on Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. It’s Wednesday afternoon and we’ve reached the end of Act One.

I’ve decided on a cast of three, not quite sure why, 2 men and a woman, and making the story work for so small a cast has been one rather fascinating technical challenge.

Stevenson’s storytelling presents another. He takes great care not to be specific in his description of Hyde: so Hyde becomes a kind of blank canvas on which we are free to project our own hatreds and fears.

Apart from a couple of horrible (and unstageable) incidents he has also left it up to us to imagine the evil actions Hyde commits.

Which is fine for a book: but not so fine for the stage.

I happen to think there’s a real wisdom in the old tragic convention of the really violent events happening off stage; and I loathe theatrical depictions of violence.

But I have a strong feeling that in this play we have got to see Hyde doing something. And it’s at the end of Act One.

When the actors rehearse it I find it profoundly disturbing.

And I think: How could I have imagined so horrible a thing?

And I worry. I worry about what playing this does to the two actors doing it. I worry about it being the woman who is the victim. I try to console myself by thinking that the actress concerned also plays the strongest and the most intellectually accomplished characters in the play.

And that I’ve written her a part I would love to play.

But she is still the victim. How banal…

And next day I’m in Glasgow to see the incredibly powerful opera James MacMillan and Scottish Opera have created out of my “Ines de Castro”.

It was in writing that play, way back in 1989, that I first discovered the amazing power of words. In the sense that you don’t necessarily need to depict horror: that it’s more powerful sometimes to describe it in a way that gives scope for the audience’s imagination.

I certainly seem to have horrified the Guardian:

“Jo Clifford’s unflinching libretto contains graphic depictions of sexual violence, infanticide and torture. The whole thing is laced with a dark sensuality that is discomfiting, but the emotional pummelling left me cold. By the time the heads of Inés’s children arrive in a suitcase — just after we’ve heard a detailed account of marital rape — my shock sensors had shut down to numb.”

That shutting down of emotional response in an audience is exactly what I’m most afraid of. And what I try so hard to avoid.

And I want to protest: but there’s so much more to my beautiful Ines than that.

And besides: we have to look. We have to see. And then we have to come out the other side.

And then I’m travelling down to London again and the man sitting opposite me looks like a retired air vice-marshall and is reading a copy of Fly Past magazine: aerial killing machine porn.

And I think: my work is not like that. And I feel quite proud to have upset the Guardian. And the Observer. And the Telegraph.

Proud that my words have that power. And proud they’ve inspired such amazing music.

And I know there is hope shines through at the end of it all.

In the words of Ines, and the words of the Woman at the end of Jekyll and Hyde: